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New research suggests links between disliking visual patterns that contain irregularities and disliking people who are different in some way. Now we need to understand better the parameters of this effect, the mechanisms behind it and its developmental origins.
Personality traits differ across geographical regions, suggesting a role for environmental factors. Wei, Lu, and colleagues show an association between regional ambient temperature and personality in two large studies conducted in China and the United States.
No plant, animal or human is impervious to the problems posed by bitter winters and scorching summers. Two large studies suggest that many Chinese and US inhabitants have adapted their personality to the temperatures at the place where they grew up.
Nook et al. show that emotion concept representations develop from a monodimensional focus on positive versus negative valence in childhood to multidimensional organization in adulthood. This expansion is facilitated by increasing verbal knowledge.
The National Institutes of Health has broadened its definition and changed the reporting requirements for ‘clinical trials’. What are the implications for basic human behavioural and brain science?
The recently updated US National Institutes of Health clinical trials policies will apply broadly to studies involving experimental manipulations of humans. These studies will require registration and reporting in ClinicalTrials.gov, grant application submission under a clinical trials funding opportunity announcement, and Good Clinical Practice training for investigators.
The brain circuitry underlying our love of music is illuminated by a new study that uses brain stimulation to alter emotional reactions to favourite songs.
By alternately exciting and inhibiting fronto-striatal pathways in the brain as participants listen to music, the authors are able to show causal evidence that this system mediates both affective and motivational responses to music.
Lamont et al. identify opportunities for cognitive bandwidth, dual-process morality and implicit association research to engage with ‘cultural repertoires’, defined as cultural schemas, frames, narratives, scripts and boundaries that actors draw on in social situations.
The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences this year, in honouring the work of Richard H. Thaler, highlights the growing impact of behavioural economics in science and policy.
Nielsen and colleagues’ analysis of a large database of medical research papers shows a correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis.